This passionate book documents the legendary grassroots and legal struggle of a determined group of Jewish women from Israel, the United States, and other parts of the world to win the right to pray out loud together as a group at the Western Wall.

This passionate book documents the legendary grassroots and legal struggle of a determined group of Jewish women from Israel, the United States, and other parts of the world to win the right to pray out loud together as a group at the Western Wall.

'I am hungry for your presence. I hanker for the great blaze of your glance which when you turn it on me, will burn out the husk of my body and draw my soul to you.' Julia O'Faolian's second novel, first published in 1973, offers a rich, vivid portrait of the political and religious turmoil of sixth-century Gaul, wherein we find Radegunda, wife of King Clotair having been seized by him as a prize of war. Radegunda builds a convent, a refuge for the Brides of Christ, and there becomes renowned for her austerity and mysticism. Her religion, however, is fanatical, and her quest for sainthood will serve to undermine the seeming calm of the retreat she has made. 'Vibrant and strange... [a] journey into a darker, wilder moment of history.' Sarah Dunant, Guardian

The Women of the Wall are leading a groundbreaking struggle to gain the Israeli authorities' permission to pray according to their manner at Judaism's holiest prayer site, the Western Wall. This book is the first comprehensive academic study of their struggle, placing it in a comparative and theoretical context of wider religion-state conflicts and models.

Women at the Wall is the first ethnographic study of how the arrest, trial, imprisonment, and release of male criminals affects their families, particularly their wives. It relies on first-person accounts by prisoners' wives, providing details about the changing texture of their marital relationships and the accompanying stigmatization. From this book we learn about the effects of enforced spousal separation, and the control husbands maintain even during incarceration. We also learn that wives devise ingenious interpretations and explanations regarding their husbands' criminality, and how they attempt to establish stable, conventional lives for themselves while supporting their husbands through the various stages of the criminal justice system. These women reveal not only their hardships and losses, but also their resourcefulness in coping with their husbands' criminality, their families and friends, and the prison system itself.

"Wall's writing is lively and exuberant. She passes her enthusiasm for these writers' works on to the reader. She captures the mood of the times and follows through with the writers' evolution -- sometimes to success, other times to isolation.... Women of the Harlem Renaissance is a rare blend of thorough academic research with writing that anyone can appreciate." -- Jason Zappe, Copley News Service "By connecting the women to one another, to the cultural movement in which they worked, and to other early 20th-century women writers, Wall deftly defines their place in American literature. Her biographical and literary analysis surpasses others by following up on diverse careers that often ended far past the end of the movement. Highly recommended... "Â -- Library Journal "Wall offers a wealth of information and insight on their work, lives and interaction with other writers... strong critiques... " -- Publishers Weekly The lives and works of women artists in the Harlem Renaissance -- Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Bessie Smith, and others. Their achievements reflect the struggle of a generation of literary women to depict the lives of Black people, especially Black women, honestly and artfully.

Jerusalem's Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif is one of the holiest places in the world for Jews and Muslims and a constant feature in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This study addresses the gendered dimensions of inter-communal disputes over sacred space in Jerusalem and the role of women in these conflicts.